I feel like karma is a bad metric to track quality contributions, especially if it is global to all communities. It's far too easy to farm. People that make useful contributions in specific communities will be known over time by other members of said community anyway.
No. It just leads to people gaming the system. I also think that counting upvotes but not downvotes is also a good idea, when ranking which posts show first. Too many people use downvote for "I disagree", which means a true idea with less than 50% popularity gets buried.
How would this even be implemented? What's to prevent one user from generating massive amounts of karma on their own instance?
I dont care about karma but i do like to see a users history, something i apparently cant do on mlem. Not sure if thats site-wide or just this app. Without that i wouldnt be able to confidently use the buy-sell communities that i did on reddit like knife_swap or watchexchange.
I always liked having karma around as a personal metric, but I never actually looked at anyone else's or went farming for it. So I think it should be added but not made a determining factor by default. If someone wants to look at someone else's karma as an evaluation, that's their choice.
Probably more important than Karma, Lemmy needs flair or tagging for posts to help with categorization and searching.
In addition to that, Lemmy (and Mastodon) eventually needs algorithmic choice. This is one place where the Fediverse falls short compared to BlueSky. A chronological feed of everything is a good place to start but let me decide what I want to view and how I want to view it. For example, if I am person that cares about karma, let me weight that so people with higher karma show up higher on my feed.
There's already "Reputation Points" so don't we already have that, but by another name? I like this name much better than "karma" by the way. I'm kinda good with what we have. It feels like an echo of some things from Reddit are here without being a total clone. Hopefully it won't influence people toward bad/annoying behavior like on Reddit.
Yes.
What differentiates these systems from more conventional forums is the karma and voting system. Imaginary internet points give people something to chase, and is no different from people playing Donkey Kong or pinball machines for high scores. It's the same basic principle.
The function it ends up serving though, is to incentivize people to participate in whatever culture exists in that particular community. While not a strong incentive at all, even a small one is enough to push people to be more informative in educational communities, funnier in comedy communities, more understanding and empathic in support group communities etc etc.
By combining this basic high-score incentive with the standard voting-pushes-shit-to-the-top, you can create a system that naturally pushes communities to better and better content. This was a key to reddits success in eventually becoming a body of preserved information, not too dissimilar to wikipedia or quora. But funnier. And with more porn.
It was key to the early days of Reddit's success, and the byproducts of this approach have produced effects that many view as a net-negative. Karma farming and copying content overall harmed the quality of content as time went on. While it was initially a successful engagement mechanism, in a more mature environment it will be counter productive, in my opinion.
That seems to discount the idea that new people are continuing to join the internet every single day, and will have never seen the older content.
It is inevitable that eventually their numbers will build to a sufficient degree that the content can, and should, be reposted to be brought to the newcoming audience.
To actually stop reposting, we would need people to stop having children, ultimately. Otherwise it is simply serving a necessary purpose.
That is a really good point, and I'm on the same page with you as far as reposting where credit is given. What I'm referring to on the concept of reposts is more akin to something posted by an originating author, which is neglected or ignored, until a high karma user simply reposts it and an engagement algorithm is tuned to float it in the feed based on karma and individual user-influence. The end result is that original content gets discouraged in lieu of limited gatekeepers of the "hive mind" nature of deigning what's "popular" vs the quality of content sorted by non-karma based metrics, if that makes sense.
To put it another way, it's just my personal preference after seeing the sheer amount of low effort karma farmers that recycle unoriginal content recently posted who are able to float posts to the top, as opposed to truly original or engaging ideas being encouraged.
That's for me at least why I'm so turned off to the idea of a user-centric reputation model as opposed to the content quality metrics, that being the individual upvote and downvote trends for each post. There won't ever be a perfect system, and I'm sure there will be reasons to attack that notion later.
I can definitely live without it, bit I do miss it a lot.
I liked my magic internet points number, man.
This. We can meme on them all day long, and we know they're worthless, but they feel nice. Oldest account had 40k+ because of a sick quilt my grandmother made.
I don't care either way. I can live without it.
I think it should, but perhaps it shouldn't be as prominent as on Reddit, and maybe it should be called something more boring, like "post vote sum" or something, to make people place less importance on it.
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